How Bruce Keeps in the Black

He may be as white as the driven snow, but Bruce Pascoe is certainly keeping himself very nicely in the black. Mostly courtesy of the taxpayer, it seems. But then, we’re only too used to being bilked by phony “Aborigines”. But when they have the cheek to go begging and crying poor, it all gets a bit much.

Not content with making a small fortune off the most obvious hoax in Australian literature since Ern Malley, Pascoe has managed to parlay his ludicrous claims to “indigenous” status in the time-honoured fashion of academic fraud, landing a luxurious sinecure at a gullible university. Around $50 grand a year for showing up one day a week.

Not even that satisfies Pascoe’s apparently unquenchable thirst for the white man’s money, though, so he’s set up an even dodgier “indigenous farm”. Flogging off native grass flours for between $350 and $450 per kilo would surely be a nice little earner – providing anyone’s both loaded and stupid enough to pay for it.

Well, perhaps they aren’t. Because Bruce is passing the begging bowl yet again, sending out an email begging for donations.

Since Bruce wants donations (I’ve chipped in $5), inspection of Black Duck accounts at the Charities Commission is rewarding. In four years with its tax-friendly status, it raised $2.2 million from donations ($1.001m) and taxpayer-funded grants ($1.206m) by June 2023. To date it has spent most or all of it on Bruce’s “old buggered-up farm” (his description). That includes $1.215 milliom wages for the 3-5 farm workers, a rather startling $149,000 rent paid to Bruce ($140,000 in 2022 alone), $82,000 buying Bruce’s farm machinery and stuff, $61,000 in fees to accountants and lawyers. Plus the usual expense bibs and bobs that other cockies pay resentfully out of their harvest and stockyard proceeds.

So, what has Bruce actually produced with those millions? Apparently he’s managed to hoodwink enough people to make a whopping $38,000 in farm sales. Quite the going enterprise.

Bruce’s obliging charity, from its $2.2 million outlay, has achieved farm sales of $38,000. There’s also been some trifling tourist farm-stays, and Bruce telling tourists yarns about pelicans coaching him in Yuin vocabulary, fee $300 an hour. There was $153,000 for outbound consulting sales, offset by a prodigious $310,000 for inbound paid consulting ($223,000 in 2022 alone). Still, I suppose all small cockies pay like that for technical consultants.

At June 30 last year, Black Duck Foods had a liquid $148,000 in the kitty (down from the previous $419,000), with net losses running at $236,000 that year (previous loss: $181,000). Those figures are after donations and grants of $317,000 (previous $660,000). I predicted by simple arithmetic last February that without further fund-raising and draconian belt-tightening/redundancies, Black Duck would be shot down in a flurry of feathers by June 30, 2024. If not a dead duck already, it’s certainly duck-shooting season. (The auditor’s 2023 report says, “The members of the association believe that the going concern assumption is appropriate”).

Ah, but ol’ mate Bruce has more than a few irons in the fires of other people’s money.

It’s also rewarding to look over Bruce’s history as a businessman/farmer. He started his yam daisy growing venture about 2012, predicting widespread product sales “soon”. In 2015 he followed up by creating a business called Gurundgi Munjie Back to Country Pty Ltd, which, in his Dark Emu is described as

…a Yuin company on the New South Wales south coast [which] is planning harvests of a number of grains, and early trials of flour production have had spectacular results.

The “spectacular” result for Gurundgi was that, on January 12, 2020, ASIC deregistered it […]

In the many Pascoe transcripts I’ve accessed, I found no update on Gurundgi Munjie Back to Country P/L.

Quadrant Online

Bruce, who is prone to making such pronouncements as “Capitalism is the destroyer of the world,” is certainly not averse to scrounging as much capital as he can. Providing other people earned it first.

P T Barnum was right.